


Fitting Survival

by lalaietha



Category: Chronicles of Riddick Series, Pitch Black (2000)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:25:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows, in the way you know things you piece together afterwards, that the thing carrying her collided with another one. Dropped her. That while they tore each other apart she crawled, covered in their blood and gore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fitting Survival

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katherine_tag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katherine_tag/gifts).



This is the hallucination, the only part her mind remembers clearly. She knows, in the way you know things you piece together afterwards, that the thing carrying her collided with another one. Dropped her. That while they tore each other apart she crawled, covered in their blood and gore. Maybe that hid her scent; maybe that covered the blood, who knew. But she crawled and she crawled and hid. She didn't know what her hiding place was, what it was made for. A food-cache, maybe, before the geologists realized (thought they realized) there was nothing else alive here. A cistern, before they knew there wouldn't be rain. Something.

Something made of good concrete, good steel, and door just big enough for her, that she could close behind her. Somehow, she did that.

She only knows that because it's where she woke up, still in her nightmare, still pouring down rain and the rain leaking in, so that she lay in water and her own blood and shivered. She only knows that because she drifted asleep and awake and the only constant was the empty dark around her and the frustrated screams of the things outside.

There's no dignity, when you're in enough pain. She already knew that. She knew that from the war. Enough pain and even if you keep it together enough to remember one thing, to remember not to talk, you lose everything else. You cry and you beg and you throw up. And she hurts everywhere, and she's cold, and there's no one here to see anyway.

She remembers bits of that. Pieces of that.

But she remembers the woman. The hallucination. The vision, maybe. The woman with twisted hair and eyes that burned with ten lives' worth of hate, crouched beside Carolyn's head, arms resting on her knees, face distant and cold.

She said, "You were supposed to die back there, you know." Carolyn closed her eyes against it, and another wave of pain and nausea, and part of her wished she _had_. How much time passed she can't say; when she opened her eyes again, the woman was still there. "You're not going to die," she said, in a voice Carolyn had never heard before.

The woman ran a finger, almost gently, along the side of Carolyn's face. It didn't feel like anything real. It felt like a fever, driving her insane. "But it's a life for a life. You'll know her when you see her. You'll know her by how he reacts to her. You'll know her by how much it makes you want to rip her throat out."

The woman, the delusion put a hand to the front of Carolyn's right shoulder; when she pushed, pressed down, Carolyn screamed as the one single pain threw all the others into nothingness. The woman's voice said, "You're one of us now," but the only thing Carolyn could see was darkness and the only thing she could hear was her own retching sobs.

Everything else, she can only put together from what she is left with. Where she is, when the pain eventually stops and she is more than a wounded animal, a needy, desperate thing pulling herself towards rest.

 

When she is, she sits up and it only makes her wince. When everything is more than dark-light-dark-light, wet-dry, delirious begging please please make the pain stop, she wakes up all at once, sits up, and knows she's on a ship.

The dizziness catches up with her; it's that, not the pain, that makes her lie down again. The world spins, or at least the part of it that she can see: medico-bunk, tiny narrow room that serves as the infirmary on a stable ship. It's one of the ways you can tell a stable ship from a transpo, she remembers, tells herself, like the words in her head will make everything stop blurring in front of her eyes: transpo just takes bodies from one place to another, mostly in cryosleep. People live on a stable ship.

"Woah woah woah, Sleeping Beauty!"

The words come with the pressured hiss of an internal door. Carolyn forces her eyes open and tries, through the haze of vertigo, to identify where any weapons might be. The kid who enters must see that: he winds up stepping back one, hands up. "Woah," he says, in a different tone. "No worries, okay? Didn't mean nothing by that, you've just been out for a good three weeks, is all. I mean, you're pretty too, but we'da called you Sleeping Beauty even if you were a huge bruiser with a face like a rusty bulkhead, y'know? We just didn't know your name."

He fades in and out as she blinks and tries to clear her eyes. Three weeks; she takes that in and thinks, knows that's why the vertigo and the sick and the fucked up. Three weeks is three weeks taking nutrition and water from injection, and your body'll do it (she did a full two months, once, during the war) but it doesn't _like_ it.

The kid has dark hair and a face almost like one of the Imam's sons. But that's all Carolyn can see; everything else is too fuzzy. She thinks about whether or not to believe him, and then she thinks about her chances of doing sweet fuck all about it if he's lying, and lets her body lie down again.

"I'mma give you the booster shot," he says, carefully, making sure all his movements are slow so she can see. "Then we'll go find you some food, right, and find the Captain and you can shoot the shit. Get the Doc to look you over, too. Okay? Okay."

She's not dead. She's on a ship. And in her head a woman's voice says, "a life for a life."

 

The ship's bigger than the infirmary implied; Carolyn can tell by the size of the mess. Food is mostly protein and nutrient packs, but meant for your body to digest, to do all the shit it normally does with food, instead of bypassing the stomach entirely. Carolyn lets herself down onto one of the round stools, the kid letting go of her arm and putting her hand down on the table.

She's in what look like doctor's scrubs, or nurse's. She's the centre of some polite attention, but there aren't many people here. She only wants to throw up a little bit. The kid's obviously been assigned to her, and brings her the food and what looks like some kind of thin sludge to drink.

He cuts a small piece of everything away and uses a clean spoon to fish out a mouthful of the sludge and takes it all himself. Pointedly. _No drugs, no poisons: just food_. Like it's an ordinary thing. Tells her, at least, who these people are used to dealing with.

The sludge is tasteless, but it soothes her throat, coats it, makes it feel like she might someday be able to talk again. The kid watches politely while she eats, leaning his chin on one hand. Now that she can see, the resemblance to Imam's boys is superficial. It still makes her chest hurt in a way that has nothing to do with any injury she may have, or have had.

Carolyn looks up when the door hisses, each time someone goes in or out, but the kid ignores almost all of them until a small man in glasses with the face of a perpetual worrier steps over the threshold. Then the boy whistles, sharply, and the man changes course to bring him over.

"I was told our guest was awake." He bows slightly, making him from somewhere near New Vegas. "I'm glad to see you about. Would you mind telling me your name? I do hate not naming someone properly."

Definitely New Vegan. She swallows; her voice when it comes out is low and rasping. "Carolyn," she says, and doesn't offer her last. There are a billion Carolyns. There's a lot of Carolyn Frys, too, out there in the universe, but she's not offering any more clues until she knows where the fuck she is and what happened.

"Carolyn," he says, "excellent." He sits down on the stool beside her and takes an instrument out of his belt, like a finger clamp. "My name is Edeti," he begins, but the boy interrupts.

"He's Doc," he says. "Oh, and I'm Space-Rat," he adds, cheerfully. He can't be more than Jack's age.

The doctor - that has to be who he is - looks pained. But he doesn't argue. Instead he says, "May I have your hand, please?"

He attaches the clamp to one of her fingers: it stings, briefly, then he takes it away and peers at it, frowning but only in thought. "Good," he says, "good. The food should balance you out the rest of the way. I'm afraid we're not equipped well enough for me to have prevented considerable scarring - most of the crew seems to regard scars as badges of honour - "

The kid - Space-Rat, if that's what he's really called - pulls up his sleeve and points to an obvious bite-mark. "Wrestled an acorba and won," he says. "You can tell I won, because it bit me and I'm still here."

"Quite," says the doctor. Carolyn finds herself smiling. He reminds her of the medico back in her unit. "As I said, I couldn't do anything for the scarring." He gestures to her sides, her back, and - her throat? She lifts a hand and feels the ridges of scar-tissue there at the side of her neck. "But everything important should be in working order. You have strong survival instincts, Miz Carolyn," he tells her. "Even delirious, you managed to do the right things to survive."

 _Strong survival instincts_ , echoes Riddick's voice in her head. They got off the planet. They had to. They were right there, there was no way -

"Was there a skimmer on the ground anywhere near where you found me?" she asks, her voice still rasping.

"Don't think so," says the kid, and the doctor's shaking his head.

"No, there was the remains of a geologists' camp, a lot of dead . . . things boiling away, your beacon, and you."

"My beacon?" Carolyn says, blank, and the doctor's lips curve slightly.

"As I said," he replied. "Even in delirium."

She feels off-balance and bewildered - but. No skimmer. They had to have taken off. They were gone. Off the planet. They survived. That was the important part. _I said I'd die for them, not for you._ Neither Jack or Imam could possibly fly it. It had to be Riddick.

 _A life for a life_ , says the echo in her head. "I don't remember much," she says. "I was - we were trying to get to the skiff. I went out to get the last of us, and one of the things got me. I crawled . . . somewhere. I was hallucinating, there was this woman . . . " she trails off, realizing she's babbling. "Where the hell am I?"

The doctor smiles in a dry sort of way. "Welcome to the _Ghost_ , Miz Carolyn. Captain T Davids presiding, and a crew of excellent pre-emptive vacuum salvage engineers."

 

Piracy is eternal. Carolyn knows that. She and the other Tenijan Rebels used to deal with them, for goods and weapons. Some were fucking nasty pieces of work. Some just didn't think rules applied to them, like "no you can't take that cargo" or "just because that ship is nicer than yours is no reason to put its passengers and crew into yours, kill the engines and set it adrift. Even if you _do_ set up a distress signal." And everything in between.

Five words with the captain of this one, and Carolyn knows he's whatever kind of pirate he fucking well feels like when he wakes up in the morning and can pull every variation out to play if he wants to. He's teaching a five year old with a very serious face to work the navigation controls when Space-Rat (apparently) brings her to the bridge to see him.

She hears him say, "Run along to your da," and then he stands up and extends a hand. And she knows even then. The five words complete it, but she knows even then.

It isn't what the words are. Those are just, "So you're awake now, then?" It's something deeper. The same thing she should have listened to when it told her to be wary of Johns; the same thing that told her she had to drop the passengers; the same thing that told her how to deal with Riddick and, because the gods like fucking irony, the same thing that dragged her back to the skiff to drag _Riddick_ back to the others.

The thing behind the scream, and the leap.

"Get lost, Rat," the captain says, and the kid disappears like a ghost. A grinning ghost, but a ghost. Carolyn sits down, because her legs are weak and shaking and to be honest, she really can't be bothered being careful of this man, even if her instincts tell her she should. She's too tired.

And what's catching up on the elated thought of _they got away they got away they got away_ is the second, pathetic thought of _they're gone_ , and knowing she had no way to track them. No way to know.

Davids looks amused. "Have a seat," he says, eyes wicked and bright. "Make yourself at home."

"How much do I owe you?" Carolyn asks, flat. "For picking me up. For the medico. For hopefully dropping me off somewhere that's not open space."

"You're a very direct person, Miz Carolyn," Davids says, leaning back in the navchair. Carolyn thinks she's sitting in - what, observation? Not the pilot. She avoided that on purpose. "It saves time, right?" He shrugs. "Call it an act of generosity."

Carolyn gives him a disbelieving look. "From a pirate?"

It gets her a frown, and a chiding tone of voice. "Pre-emptive vacuum salvage engineer," he corrects her. "Occasional privateer and mercenary. Not a pirate. And for your information, I'm known for my spontaneous acts of generosity, almost as much as I'm known for spreading bits of people who try to cross me over somewhere public. Ask anyone you like." He folds his hands, and waits for her to react.

"Why would you be generous?" she asks, not letting his tone get to her, and she thinks he looks pleased. And, uncomfortably, knowing.

"Because I admire people who refuse to give up," he replies. "And anyone who managed to live through the night of those things we saw rotting away in the sun down there and still drag her broken bleeding barely animated corpse to cobble together a half-assed beacon to try to get someone's attention before she finally falls over - well. That's admiration earned. Most people, when they sacrifice themselves, just give up and get martyred."

Her head is still light, and her mind slow. But she knows he shouldn't be able to make remarks about martyrdom. There's no way for the doctor to have told him about that before she got up here, and nothing on the surface that should have shown anything.

 _You should have died back there. A life for a life._

"Something else wanted me to live," she tells him. The words come up of their own accord, but she's the one who decides to let them out of her mouth. And she isn't surprised when the captain doesn't do anything, doesn't look dubious, doesn't flicker an eyelash, just shrugs.

"It's that kind of time," he says. "Probably be omens and portents soon. Maybe some End Times. Those are always exciting. Not my problem, though. You'll be put down on the next halfway civilized rock we stop at, Miz Carolyn," he tells her, in a voice that says she shouldn't try to discuss it any further, or anything else he just said. A voice that says, in fact, that the conversation is over and she should consider herself lucky. "Don't break anything while you're here."

 

The planet's called Otoros. It's a shithole, but it's a shithole with an active port, and Carolyn doesn't figure she's in any position to be complaining.

Especially not when the bag the Space-Rat kid presses into her hand turns out to be filled with credit discs, clothes, some rations, three good-sized water-bottles and a working slug-thrower. The slug-thrower has a message on it, too. Little palm-sized bit of paper.

The scrawled words are _something wanted you to live. make sure you remember what it wants._

Later, in her closet-berth on the first ride she could get (short-hop two systems over, to a bigger space-port, linked into the inter-system databases and lanes), as she opens one of the water-bottles and takes a careful sip, she does think about it. About the life-for-a-life, and whether she believes in the hallucination at all. The hallucination that wanted her to kill someone (and she knew it was kill, not save), and said she would know _her_ when she saw her.

But also that Carolyn would know _her_ by how _he_ reacted to her. And she thinks there's only one 'he' that could be. So for now she doesn't have to make a decision. For now, she and the hallucination want the same thing, anyway. The problem is that Riddick's not going to be easy to find.

Sitting in her berth, running her fingertips over the new texture of the scars at her neck, Carolyn Fry finds she's not worried about "not easy."


End file.
